


Shackles Can't Bind the Soul, or Something Like That

by LadyNighteyes



Category: Radiant Historia
Genre: Angst, Gen, Humor, Spoilers, daemon AU, rewrite of an old fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-09-30 17:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17228240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyNighteyes/pseuds/LadyNighteyes
Summary: A collection of daemon AU one-shots.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In 2013, I wrote several daemon AU ficlets on Tumblr, and I've wanted to do something more with them on and off basically ever since. This did not happen.
> 
> And then, a couple weeks ago, I was going through the depths of my blog looking for things to back up, and I found the first one.
> 
> And I looked at it. And I looked at it.
> 
> And then I rewrote the whole thing.
> 
> (I'm blaming everyone who didn't talk me out of it for Marco's daemon. Especially Quicksilver-ink.)
> 
> \--  
> Tags for this chapter: Stocke, Eruca, Raynie, Marco, All of the spoilers, Angst

Eruca had thought she'd been prepared for anything.

She'd watched her brother die, four years ago, kneeling on the floor of the Royal Hall. She'd seen the golden jaguar beside him, chained and bloody, flicker out like a snuffed candle as the bullet took him in the chest. She still remembered her father's face, as impassive as the scorpion on his shoulder. It would have been less horrible if he'd gloated.

She'd torn her soul in half to bring Ernst back, and in the end it had meant nothing. He'd died again a month later, in a ritual that hadn't slowed the desert at all.

Technically, she didn't know what had happened in the Royal Hall the night their father had died. She'd tried at first to believe Ernst had escaped when the assassin had come for the king, but she'd stopped trying to convince herself after a few years. But as irrational as it was, it hadn't _felt_ real, even at the start.

She only had the word of her father and his personal guards that Ernst's body had been breathing when they dragged Eruca to a bed and him to a cell. She'd spent the next month trying to see him, just once, but as the guards told her apologetically, her father had been very firm. There hadn't been much use trying to sneak past; she'd known that even at twelve. They'd be watching for a child settled early, and for a strange white bird.

Ernst had settled young, too.

Sometimes, in the pit of a bad night, her mind had gone to all the ways she might have botched it, everything her inexpert spell could have done that they might have felt the need to hide from her. Sometimes she'd wondered if she'd really brought him back at all.

Nothing about the Alistellians could possibly be worse than that.

Marie had slipped her the report as she fussed with Eruca's curls one morning. Eruca had ears in Selvan's spy network; very little reached the queen and her fat, glossy mink that Eruca didn't hear first. And this time... well. This time she was especially glad of that.

The leak had come from somewhere high in Alistel's government: three assassins with orders to infiltrate the palace through the sewers, make their way to Eruca's room, and kill her. There were names, sparse descriptions, a map of their planned route through the palace. Eruca had few illusions about how much her stepmother would mourn if she died, but Selvan and Dias, at least, would realize the political danger of being the people in charge when the heir to the throne was assassinated by a foreign power in the center of the palace.

The Alistellians would be walking into a deathtrap.

A spearwoman mage with a dog. A short healer with a daemon small enough to conceal.

It was a crazy plan, but those had always been Ernst's favorites. And why not? They needed the help. If the Alistellians wanted to kill her to undermine the stability of Granorg, why not give them another option? And if they turned it down, they'd be doing so in a room with a half-dozen crossbows trained on them, and her people would know their faces.

The leader, a blond swordsman with a great cat.

It wasn't as if it was vanishingly rare- sabretooths were common enough out in the plains that you saw someone with one now and again. The regal cats were shyer and less fond of carrion, so the only way most people saw them was on heraldry. Still, you got the odd fluke. General Raul of Alistel had a snow leopard, she knew.

She remembered Shani, beautiful and perfect, a constant presence at her brother's side. Eruca had been so young when Ernst had settled that she couldn't remember his daemon taking any other shape. A huge golden cat, dappled with rings of black.

She remembered two days before, coming back from a meeting with an agent to the east. That strange magic; a Beastkind child and three humans. And a distant glance of a man's profile that had niggled at the back of her mind.

She'd do it in Shani's memory.

"One of them may... resemble my brother," she had said.

Will had grinned knowingly. "Found yourself a distant cousin, have you?"

A royal bastard, he meant. "I'm not certain," she'd said, "but perhaps."

Well, it wasn't _complet_ _ely_ impossible.

They'd sent her out of the castle before the trap was sprung, and she'd gone quietly. She'd slipped away with Marie as they escorted her to a secure tower elsewhere on the grounds, half guest house and half prison. Eruca had an understanding with her guard detail. She kept a scarf over her face when she reached the El Dorado Tavern. If anyone had asked, she would have told them it was against the smell from the waterway. Amichai huddled in a pocket of her cloak, out of sight.

She'd thought she'd been prepared.

And then Otto had ushered the three assassins into the room, and her heart had nearly stopped.

She heard a sharp intake of breath from Marie, the cat on her shoulder bridling, and Will paused with his drink halfway to his lips. She did her best to appear calm; as Ernst had told her once, if you could _look_ like you were in control, you were halfway there already. She didn't dare look at Pierre.

A spearwoman with a dog, a short man, and... her brother, glancing around the room without a trace of recognition.

And then his daemon padded in behind them, wary, like a rearguard, and she thanked every god she could think of that none of them could see her face.

What had she _done_ to him?

She remembered both too much and too little about that night. The feeling of cooling blood soaking through her clothes had wormed its way into her nightmares, but the actual spell was a fog. She remembered pain; she remembered the certain knowledge that it was magic never meant to be performed by a twelve-year-old and it wanted more than she could give. She remembered making a knife of mana and light that only half-existed; she remembered Amichai screaming as he flitted from shape to shape. And, now, she remembered the pull, the ache, as her soul was drawn to itself, trying to come back together.

She felt it again now.

Eruca steeled herself and swallowed down the taste of bile.

Her brother _seemed_ to be watching whoever was talking, cool, analytical, and distant, but Eruca could feel his daemon's unwavering gaze throughout the conversation. Well, she doubted Amichai, tense on her shoulder now that she'd revealed herself, was much better.

It hurt, how familiar those green eyes were.

As Eruca hurriedly pulled up her scarf, heart hammering after the near-miss with the guard patrol, she swore she could tell the exact moment her brother's daemon stepped out of the back room from the itch of the stare on her back. The three of them had been remarkably quick about getting their daemons out of sight.

"Princess, we should head back to the palace-" Marie said, and Eruca nodded distractedly.

"Ah, Princess, I have one question, if you don't mind?"

To Eruca's surprise, it was the healer who had spoken. He was even shorter than her, with a shock of brown hair and an orange jelly-frog like the ones in the underground waterway on his shoulder. "Yes?" she said, "What is it?"

"Your daemon," he said, gesturing at Amichai, perched on Eruca's hand. "I've never seen anything like it. What is-"

"Marc!" the spearwoman interjected, rounding on him. "You can't just _ask_ someone something like that!"

"Ow! Jeez, Raynie, I was just curious, I'm sorry-"

"It's a white chough," Stocke said.

His daemon padded over and sat down at his feet, still staring at Eruca, composed as ever in the sudden, awkward silence. "What?" the healer asked.

"A chough. Those black birds with the red beaks, except hers is white. Am I right?" he said, watching her with unreadable eyes.

"Yes," she said, looking for some sign of... _something_ that would tell her what he was thinking. "You are correct."

Raynie punched the short man in the arm. "See, Marc? You could have just asked Stocke. Guess he knows birds on top of everything else."

"Not really," Stocke said, shrugging. "It was a lucky guess."

"I really must be going, now," Eruca said, forcing herself to look away and settling Amichai in her pocket as she headed for the door.

When she glanced behind her as she left, Stocke's daemon was still watching her. A jaguar, green-eyed and black as night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags for this chapter: Kiel, Rosch, Stocke, Humor, Daemon mechanics, canon-typical inability to remember promotions

Kiel was never, _ever_ going to get used to the way the lieutenant's daemon _prowled_. He watched her nervously over Rosch's shoulder as the major sipped at the sticky, thick tea the Sand Fortress outpost ran on. The big panther stalked around the edges of the mess hall, sniffing into empty corners.

Stocke was nowhere in sight.

"It's your turn, Kiel," Major Rosch said. The lioness curled up at his feet lazily flicked her tail, watching Kiel with one yellow eye.

"Oh! I'm sorry, sir," Kiel said, focusing on the chessboard in case it had all suddenly come clear with the last move. It had not. Kiel moved a pawn forward experimentally, only to lose it to Rosch's queen.

He glanced over the major's shoulder again, watching the black cat pace. She'd neared the table where the NCOs from another brigade were having their weekly poker game now, and there was a general, subtle lean toward the other side of the table as she passed.

"Your turn," Rosch said, patiently.

"Ah... right," Kiel said, jerking his eyes back to the board, which still stubbornly refused to resolve into a sweeping map of strategies and tactics. Pepper leaned against his leg, and Kiel surreptitiously scratched the terrier's ears.

He was starting to regret volunteering to play. Everyone said chess was the game of generals, and the way Kiel was going, his floundering was going to make Major Rosch think he needed to be kept as far away from that rank as possible.

The major turned to look behind him as Kiel stared helplessly at the chess set. "Ahh," Rosch said. "So that's why you've been jumping like you've seen a ghost."

A change of topic! A change of topic was good. "Sir," Kiel said, "we-- I mean, the men and I-- we've been wondering..." Well, "gossiping" would probably be more accurate, but Kiel wasn't going to admit that.

"Yeah, I bet you have," Rosch said with a sigh, and Kiel had a discomfiting feeling that Rosch knew exactly what he'd just been thinking. "I wish he'd be a little more discreet about it, but it's _his_ daemon."

"You've known Sergeant Stocke for a long time, right sir?" Kiel asked. "Do you know how he does it?" Kiel finally spotted a move, and leaped a knight forward to take one of the black pawns. "I can't get more than a couple dozen feet from Pepper before it hurts too much to keep going," Kiel continued as the major moved a rook up beside it. "Oliver says he even saw the sergeant's daemon walking around once while the sergeant was asleep!"

Rosch took another sip of his tea. "Yes," he said resignedly. "She does that sometimes."

"Is it some sort of special magic training for scouting?" Kiel asked eagerly. "Holly said she heard the head of the intelligence department invented it. Roy thought it was a blessing from the Prophet for strength of faith, but the rest of us didn't think that was very likely since nobody's seen you or Field Marshal Viola or General Hugo or anyone like that do it. Corporal Raynie said Sergeant Stocke is a prototype from a top-secret thaumatech project to make a person with an artificial daemon, but- Captain! Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," Rosch said, once the coughing fit had subsided. "I'll be having a talk with Raynie later," he added grimly. "And Stocke, for that matter. I hope the men haven't been wasting their time trying to imitate him."

"Of course not, sir!" said Kiel, who had, the previous evening, personally refereed for Scott and Briar as they competed to see whose daemon could get closer to a mark that was generally agreed to be about where the s- _lieutenant's_ daemon had stood during drills that morning. (He was going to get the hang of the change in ranks _eventually_ , he told himself.)

"Yeah, well," said Rosch, who Kiel was once again unsure hadn't read his mind, "it'd better stay that way. You're soldiers of Alistel, not a bunch of unsettled kids."

"Yes, sir," said Kiel, who was suddenly very engrossed in trying to decide where to move his queen.

The game continued. Rosch asked if anyone in the brigade had had trouble getting their gear replaced after the battle, and Kiel volunteered that the quartermaster had run short on helmets. Kiel lost another pawn. On the other side of the room, Stocke's daemon reared onto her hind legs to look into a barrel, and _ye gods_ , it was easy to forget just how _big_ she was when she was so often next to Rosch's even bigger lioness. Pepper was leaning so heavily against his leg that Kiel was pretty sure she'd fall over if he moved it.

"Check," Rosch said.

Chess, Kiel thought, was not his game.

The panther, which had climbed onto one of the benches to, to all appearances, minutely inspect a broken thaumlight, dropped back to all fours and leapt to the floor.

Kiel hastily moved his king out of the line of fire, and Pepper dipped into a play-bow as Stocke's daemon passed. The panther gave her a polite, perfunctory bat with one paw, then slipped out of the room on silent feet.

An unfortunate realization hit Kiel several minutes too late.

"She... couldn't hear us, could she, Captain?" Kiel asked. "I mean, she was searching the room, so maybe..." The blank, fixed look on Rosch's face was not encouraging.

Kiel slumped forward to bury his face in his hands. "The sergeant is never going to talk to me again, is he."

"Some officer he'd be if he'd write off a subordinate over something like that," Rosch said. "I think he's used to it by now, anyway."

Kiel knew he should stop prying. He _knew_ it. But- "Has he... always been like this?" he asked, looking up.

"As long as I've known him," Rosch said, moving his queen forward with a decisive sort of click.

Kiel stared at the board for some moments and then, not strictly believing what he was doing, took the queen with a knight.

Rosch moved a pawn forward. "Check."

There was only one move Kiel could make. Kiel made it.

"Check and mate," Rosch said, which was something of a relief. "Not bad for a first game. But we'd better be getting back, or you'll be late for inspections." That was even more of a relief, at least until Kiel remembered that inspections meant facing Lieutenant Stocke.

Rosch finished the remainder of his tea in one gulp, then turned the board over and began to slot the chess pieces back into place in grooves on the underside, the bladed fingers of his left hand moving with a delicacy that would have surprised Kiel even a few months ago. It folded up neatly when the major was done, locking with a catch on the side; Kiel wondered how many war camps and battlefields the chess set had been to over the years.

As they left the mess hall, lioness and terrier on either side of them, Kiel finally screwed up his courage and said, "There was something else--"

They'd told it like a ghost story, back at the mine.

Kiel had been a runner, one of a gaggle of local kids the owner paid to deliver messages. He'd been good at it, too- he was fast on his feet, and he had a good memory for the quickest ways through the network of tunnels and shafts. The older miners, for their part, saw the runners as a fresh and ever-cycling audience for their tall tales. In just a few months, Kiel had heard all about vengeful ghosts of long-dead Granorg nobles, gods of the mountain placated by the Prophet Noah, caves where the air itself was poison, things that lived in dark water deep underground, and ancient Satyros curses. He hadn't really believed most of them, but then, being believed wasn't really the point.

But there had been one...

It had happened six years before, they'd said. Number 2 Shaft, chasing a vein of iron, had hit a bad fault, and though they'd evacuated the lower levels in time, it turned out to have meandered under a branch of #3. Kiel had heard the story more than once, and never the same way twice, but in all of them, when the fault slipped and the floor and ceiling collapsed, there was one unlucky man caught in the tunnel.

It was a freak accident, they'd all agreed, the way his rat daemon had fallen and he'd been trapped in the tunnel above. It was a miracle they'd survived. Some wondered if it was divine protection; some suggested it was the opposite.

He'd gone back to work afterward. But he was different, they said-

"Let me guess," Rosch interrupted him. He was looking ahead as he spoke, not at Kiel, and his face was a mask. "Quiet," he said. "Cold-blooded. And could separate from his daemon."

After a moment's internal struggle, Kiel gave up and just said, "Yes, sir."

"Did you ever meet him?"

"Once or twice, but just to deliver messages. I never really talked to him," Kiel said. "I wondered-"

Kiel trailed off as they passed a group of soldiers going the other direction, though they gave the capta- _major's_ lioness a respectful berth. He didn't begin again even when they were well down the hallway; it had suddenly dawned on him what he was asking. There was prying and there was _prying_ , and he was doing both.

"I wondered the same thing once," Rosch said, quietly. "Saw it happen after a battle. Corpse retrieval squad didn't realize one of the dead wasn't. Prophet alone knows how she survived."

Kiel stared up at him, shocked. "So the lieutenant isn't...?"

"No," Rosch said. "I asked Sonja, and she read me the riot act. 'Intercision patients _listen_ when a doctor tells them to stay in bed' was her wording, I think."

Kiel, who had seen Doctor Sonja's goose daemon on the warpath, developed a newfound respect for the sergeant's bravery.

"If anyone knows, it's him, and the most I've ever heard him say when someone asked is 'I just can.'" Kiel could almost hear the sergeant's chilly, aristocratic accent; he'd swear it got stronger when Stocke was telling them off. "It's best to just take it in stride. Saves a watch shift, at least. What's with that look?"

"It just sounds... I don't know." Hours upon hours, staring into the darkness, impossibly, unimaginably _alone_... "Cold, somehow."

"That's Stocke for you," the captain said, clapping Kiel on the shoulder with more of his usual brisk joviality. "You'll get used to it eventually. Now, chin up. Don't want to ruin morale on the home front by turning up to get our medals from the general with you looking gloomier than Protea's deepest dungeon and your daemon's tail between her legs."

"Yes, sir!" Kiel tried to smile; Pepper held her head up determinedly and trotted faster to catch up with them.

"And think of how much time you'll have to practice chess while we're on the road," Rosch said, and his lioness chuffed a low laugh as Pepper's tail drooped in immediate dismay. Kiel laughed, too- sheepish, but more genuine than the smile had been.

He didn't notice the panther's green eyes as they passed a darkened storeroom, and, when they reached the barracks, he didn't question the look of quiet resignation in Stocke's.


End file.
